


While Though the Tempest Loudly Roars

by englishable



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Credence Barebone Needs a Hug, Gen, Sibling Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 12:44:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11335875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: Modesty Barebone is still hiding in the upstairs tenement when, at sunrise, it begins to rain. She would feel terribly alone, just now, except that there is something here in the darkness alongside her (and always has been).





	While Though the Tempest Loudly Roars

…

And at sunrise, after the wailing and gnashing of teeth has finished, it begins to rain.

Modesty hears the sound break overhead in a great, soft sigh like the abandonment of a conviction. Water causes the light to ripple, seeps through cracks in the tenement’s stained plaster, pools in places where the floorboards have been trodden thin by the feet of the dead. Rats peer out at her from along the room’s shadowed walls, stitching the darkness with the glittering sequins of their eyes.

She keeps her knees drawn in against her chest and listens to the rain. It puddles near her toes, and she tucks them closer so that it will not touch her. She does not shut her eyes, because there inside the hiding-place of her mind will be Credence.  

(Credence fumbling blankly at the clasp to his belt, Credence watching Mother plunge screaming through the air, Credence standing amidst the dust and shadows, Credence with his bowed shoulders and his flitting smiles and those pale, shivering hands, touching things in painstaking diffidence as though to apologize for disturbing them, Credence Credence Credence – )

 She turns her head aside to vomit again. It burns her throat and makes her vision swim. She presses her hands to her cheeks, searchingly, and finds them still damp from her crying.

But, dutifully, Modesty knows that crying is an indulgence. One must never do it aloud– not when the baby falls asleep feverish with typhoid and is found blue-gray cold the next morning, not when Father dies in the fields of France where the red flowers grow from his flesh, not when her own name is removed like an old dress and exchanged for another.

One must never.

(Credence holding her braids in place for her to pin them up, Credence’s face remaining gravely set when she asks in utmost, whispering confidence precisely what vulgar and arcane mysteries are meant when one refers to the cat’s pajamas, Credence keeping a page balanced between his fingertips until she – slower, of course, because nothing ever seems true until she reads it twice – is finished with it, Credence standing patiently and eternally and immovably as the barrier of time between Modesty and their mother’s stealthy tempers.)

The rain is just stopping when Modesty hears the noise.

It is a slithering like sand, a skittering like claws. 

Something heaves, growls, guttural like wet silk being dragged through a speaking tube, and then ashes pour from all four corners of the room in long grasping tendrils to gather in the middle of the floor. They writhe and roil until they have formed the shape of a man.

Credence gives a drowned gasp. Modesty flinches.

She waits for Credence to move, or to change again into something yet more terrible than before.

He does not. 

Instead he opens his eyes and seems to take slow, blind account of his body, bringing those tracery-boned hands patting along his chest – he raises them to the new morning light, which passes through them so cleanly that it shows the blood beneath – before laying them over his eyes. He begins to weep.

(The wailing, she thinks, the gnashing of teeth, that great and formless thing with claws which had poured out of his body, Mother screaming as she fell –)

Sobs bulge from Credence’s throat. He chokes, and it sounds briefly as though he will suffocate on his own grief.

  _(“I trusted you. I thought you were my friend. I thought you were different.”)_

 Modesty goes to him on her hands and knees.

“Credence?”

 Now he is the one who flinches, so violently it is as though she has stuck him with a red-hot iron. This momentum carries him springing to his knees before he can look at her and know her, and by then he is scrabbling backwards towards the wall.

“Get away,” Credence says. His body shudders. “Get away from me – get out, get out, get out –”

“Credence?” she says, again, and decides her voice makes her sound like a stupid little baby. “Credence, what’s happening?”

“Modesty, please, I don’t –” he breath snatches “—how long I can –”

He shudders again. His skin flashes all over with a thousand stinging cuts – welts, she realizes, the same as the belt always left striped across his back and legs, except these are silver-bright – that fade again in an instant, but in that instant Modesty feels her whole body come alive with such a transcendent rage that she forgets entirely about being afraid.  

“Who did that to you?”

Her voice is striking-loud. Credence spasms at the noise. He groans. The gray ash hisses swiftly out from between the cracks in the walls, making its dry rattlings and scrapings like tossed knucklebones. It creeps forward.

Modesty, for her part, stands up.

“Go away.” She stamps her booted feet as though scattering roaches, which of course she has done many times in this very same room.  Sometimes she would throw a match to the oil lamp at night and watch them startle. “Leave him alone. Go curse somebody else.”

The ash sweeps closer. Red embers glitter within it depths, live coals and sharp teeth.

Witchcraft, Modesty tries to remember. Black magic. Black magic must never be trusted, the old books and stories say, no matter what it promises you at the beginning. Black magic leaves marks, keeps accounts, lays claims, gives nothing freely. It takes and takes and takes and takes. Black magic is small and narrow-hearted because it does not understand things which cannot, by their nature, be possessed.

(Mother and Credence ascending the stairs, Mother holding out her hand with its shallow-lined palm upturned, Mother who was not her mother and would never have been for all the false second names in the world.)

Modesty spreads her arms.  

Credence has lurched to his feet, clutched at her shoulder. Her heart is a tight, tiny loop enclosing only herself and her brother and this dark, wicked, huge and hungering thing which does not much mind whether it will be a part of him or devour him whole and may indeed see no difference between the two.

“He doesn’t belong to you,” says Modesty Barebone. Her voice is cracked and small. “You can’t have him. You won’t –”

(Credence reaching out as they walk, Credence taking her hand.)

“—I won’t let you hurt him anymore.”

The ash and smoke and darkness all halt at once to think upon this proposition. The wailing and the gnashing of teeth go silent. There is an odd sinking, a settling. The leaden-colored mass around them whorls in its place, making the morning sunlight of the room grow dappled like the light inside a forest, and then everything withdraws in another final rasp and vanishes.

Credence’s hand remains clutching her shoulder, so Modesty looks up.

He is staring at her. His mouth works but makes no sound. She holds herself stiff with suspicion and realizes she is still crying, that she has likely been crying all this while – oh well. She wipes at the snot dribbling disgracefully from her nose.

“Can a boy be a witch?” she asks, finally. “Or are you a wi –” she hiccups “—a wizard?”

Credence has not stopped his trembling yet, though he still manages to get his arms about her and hold her against him for a very long time. His sobs build to become a stab-sharp keening. 

Modesty is afraid what might happen if she touches him, when she touches him, but then she knots her arms around his waist anyway and hears a great, soft sigh. 

…

**Author's Note:**

> So I finally watched “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” and Credence Barebone’s fate upset me so much that I broke my fanfic hiatus to vent my spleen. And I really did have a lot of questions about Modesty, at the end of the film. Was her memory erased, or not? Did she forget about Credence? I HOPE NOT.


End file.
